ess in
Dryden's humour, apart from the coarseness of his age,--a certain
forcible roughness of touch which belongs to the character of the man.
His _An Evening's Love, or the Mock Astrologer_, an adaptation from _Le
Feint Astrologue_ of the younger Corneille, produced at the King's
theatre in 1668, seemed to Pepys "very smutty, and nothing so good as
_The Maiden Queen_ or _The Indian Emperor_ of Dryden's making." Evelyn
thought it foolish and profane, and was grieved "to see how the stage
was degenerated and polluted by the licentious times." _Ladies a la
Mode_, another of Dryden's contract comedies, produced in 1668, was "so
mean a thing," Pepys says, that it was only once acted, and Dryden never
published it. Of his other comedies, _Marriage a la Mode_ (produced
1672), _The Assignation, or Love in a Nunnery_ (1673), _The Kind Keeper,
or Mr Limberham_ (1678), only the first was moderately successful.

While Dryden met with such indifferent success in his willing efforts to
supply the demand of the age for low comedy, he struck upon a really
popular and profitable vein in heroic tragedy. _Tyrannic Love, or the
Royal Martyr_, a Roman play dealing with the persecution of the
Christians by Maximin, in which St Catherine is introduced, and with her
some supernatural machinery, was produced in 1669. It is in rhymed
couplets, but the author again did not trust solely for success to them;
for, besides the magic incantations, the singing angels, and the view of
Paradise, he made Nell Gwyn, who had stabbed herself as Valeria, start
to life again as she was being carried off the stage, and speak a
riotous epilogue, in violent contrast to the serious character of the
play. _Almanzor and Almahide, or the Conquest of Granada_, a tragedy in
two parts, was written in 1669 to 1670. The historical background is
taken chiefly from Mlle de Scudery's romance of _Almahide_, but Dryden
borrows freely from other books of hers and her contemporaries. This
piece seems to have given the crowning touch of provocation to the wits,
who had never ceased to ridicule the popular taste for these extravagant
heroic plays. Dryden almost invited burlesque in his epilogue to the
second part of _The Conquest of Granada_, in which he charged the comedy
of the Elizabethan age with coarseness and mechanical humour, and its
conceptions of love and honour with meanness, and claimed for his own
time and his own plays an advance in these respects. _The Rehearsal_,